Aloha Friday

If you missed it, here are a couple of pertinent pieces written today. One, by the blatantly honest Jeff Macke, takes a look at Las Vegas Sands, which closed the week at 7.44. That gives me a quite voluptuous paper profit so far. Just wish I'd had more cash on Wednesday when I got a few shares.

The other piece is by Ken McCullough, whom I had never heard of, but his perspective is interesting. It's about groupthink and Cramer and Kass and whether the retail investor needs a shepherd to read the market's fickle ways.

As for my trading, I was quite aesthetic yesterday, quite as a monk in a cave. Watching but quiet. Today was the opposite. With Fed stress-test news out, the financials were all over, up and down and I made back all that I'd lost (on paper) with my STUPID, overly expensive buys of BAC and FAS early in the week. Then my stop-loss orders kicked in and left me at break-even instead of a tidy profit, leaving me to doubt the process. Why?

Both stocks had rallied huge and were a good 25 to 30 cents above my entry points -- and stop-loss prices -- when the market makers decided to alter the market. They dove all the way down and cleared out my sell orders, and probably thousands of others, before taking the price back up from whence they came.

Dirty m*******f*****kers.

Now I know better. When my stocks have exploded and I'm tracking them closely -- I actually moved up my limit sell orders twice during today's rally before switching to trailing stops -- it's an absolute must to make the stops real tight, as close as possible to the current price. Don't get me wrong: I'm glad and thankful as heck that I'm not thousands of dollars underwater anymore. But tight stops would've netted me a decent profit after all that struggle.

Anyway, I netted positive for the day after that horrendous Monday. Tweaking along the way, that's what has to be done.